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33 Buckets: Bridging the Water Gap - A story from Classroom Innovation to Global Impact
July 25, 2023 - During the UN 2023 Water Conference, UNESCO reported that approximately 2 billion people, accounting for 26% of the population, globally lack access to safe drinking water. The number of people in the global urban population experiencing water scarcity is estimated to increase twofold, from 930 million in 2016 to 1.7–2.4 billion by the year 2050.
33 Buckets is a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing access to clean water to underserved communities in the global South. Their approach involves implementing engineering solutions that prioritize clean water access, and they do so through a human-centered design focus.
The mission of 33 Buckets is centered on empowering communities and securing enduring access to clean water. This means tailoring all their solutions to suit the specific needs of each community while ensuring long-lasting and sustainable outcomes. To achieve this, they maintain ongoing collaboration with their partner communities, avoiding a "one-size-fits-all" or "touch and go" approach.
By continuously working together, they ensure that their solutions are tailored to meet the unique needs of each community and create sustainable, long-term impacts for clean water access.
Starting as a school project at Arizona State University in 2011, 33 Buckets officially became a nonprofit organization in 2016.
Five students were approached by Enamul Hoque, the founder of the Rahima Hoque Girls' College in rural Bangladesh, as a part of Arizona State University's EPICS program for support in providing clean drinking water to his school. These five students launched the team to design a technical solution to the school’s water issues that later went on to be a nonprofit organization. The first project that the co-founders worked on was providing access to clean water to an all-girls school, Rahima Hoque Girls' College, in Bangladesh.
The EPICS program, short for Engineering Projects in Community Service, stands as a nationally acclaimed social entrepreneurship initiative. Through this program, teams actively engage in designing, constructing, and implementing systems to address engineering-related challenges faced by charitable organizations, schools, and various not-for-profit groups. Instead of waiting until graduation, students make a significant impact today by taking on real-world problems with enthusiasm and dedication.
Daniel Hoop, CEO of 33 Buckets had been heavily involved in the EPICS program throughout his college career. He even served as a Teaching Assistant for the EPICS High program designed for high school students interested in engineering.
“It’s an amazing program. I mean really it's all about experiential learning and showing undergraduate engineers what's in the engineer design process, really focusing on identifying the problem, speaking with the community partner, understanding their needs and desires and ways of life, creating a solution, and then testing it, iterating it,” Hoop explained.
“That experience of traveling for the first time, really immersing myself in the community, the culture and just seeing the enthusiasm that the and the appreciation that the people in this community had was just one of those completely transformational experiences,” Mark Huerta, one of the co-founders and chairman, said.
During their first project, the co-founders discovered that one of the biggest problems that they had to tackle was arsenic contamination from the water in the school. The initial group of engineering students conducted extensive online research and figured out a method to build a filter that could effectively remove arsenic contamination from water. They utilized a combination of different rocks, gravel, and sand placed in a bucket to achieve this filtration process. The element arsenic, with an atomic number of 33, served as the inspiration behind the organization's name, "33 Buckets," signifying the innovative use of buckets in the mission to purify water and combat arsenic pollution.
While the EPICS program gave 33 Buckets the foundation to launch, the nonprofit grew in size and effort through meaningful connections. In late 2020, 33 Buckets came in contact with The GREEN Program, dedicated to bridging the divide between traditional textbook learning and career development, with a focus on driving positive change.
Their mission is to achieve this through the implementation of short-term, accredited, experiential education programs abroad, with a strong emphasis on sustainable development. By providing participants with hands-on experiences and practical knowledge, it aims to empower individuals to make a meaningful impact on the world while advancing their careers.
The GREEN Program had come across a number of communities that lacked access to clean water. This gave 33 Buckets the opportunity to get in touch with the Mayor and some of his associates in a district of Cusco, Peru through The GREEN Program.
33 Buckets is working with communities in Peru that are very rural and difficult to reach out to. These are agricultural communities with minimal technologies. This requires the nonprofit to build direct relationships with the government and other local agencies and charities in order to provide and strengthen a solution.
They started with installing third-party filtration systems in schools, followed by educating the children on how the system works, how to maintain hygiene, and about W.A.S.H. This led them to work with various schools and learn how water advisory boards operate in different communities.
“These systems are great. We install them, build the structure, install the tank, teach the teachers how to use it, teach the kids about it, perform maintenance, and provide the manual,” Hoop said.
“There's always continuous monitoring and evaluation going on over there. And the communities are always raising a pool of funds to fix pipes, you know, address the filtration systems as needed. So there's sort of a lot of processes in place over there to kind of monitor things and fix things continuously,” Huerta said, concerning the maintenance of the filtration systems installed by 33 Buckets.
Alongside educating the younger population, 33 Buckets also conducts water manager training programs that empower the managers and educate them on how to operate and fix the filtration systems and make sure that the people have access to clean water.
In certain communities lacking the necessary infrastructure to construct a filtration system, the nonprofit took proactive measures to address this issue. They distributed household filtration systems to these underserved areas, ensuring access to clean and safe drinking water for the residents.
“My hope is that we're able to scale up and hire a lot more people and create more opportunities also for some of the local people, to be able to support their communities, and transfer a lot of the knowledge and things we've learned along the way to locals and be able to support them,” Huerta said.
Story by Riva Surana, ASU Lodestar Center.
Photo: Mark Huerta giving clean water to children in Peru during the initial 33 Buckets project
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